Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people – political figures, priests, explorers – and not for the real things that happened in these places – the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.”

— Louise Erdrich

202. “They remembered volleyball as a laid back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over.”

— Louise Erdrich

203. “Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.”

— Louise Erdrich

204. “A newborn baby has a powerful effect on character. But so does a toddler. A child. A preteen. A teenager. A mother changes with every stage. Some stages are within a mother’s skill set. Some stages are like being told to scale a cliff using a rope attached to nothing.”

— Louise Erdrich

205. “Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.”

— Louise Erdrich

206. “They drew their water from sloughs or tiny springs, lighted their homes with kerosene. Yet here they were, each person, presenting themselves in worn immaculate clothing. As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.”

— Louise Erdrich

207. “She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.”

— Louise Erdrich

208. “Who but an NDN would know that some days truth is a ghost who shouts in the voice of no one in particular and other days it is a secret nostalgia poured into the coffee cups of the living?”

— Louise Erdrich

209. “It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too.”

— Louise Erdrich

210. “My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.”

— Louise Erdrich

211. “I saved myself by starting a story... I fainted, lost breath, so that I could hardly keep moving my lips. But I did continue and recovered. I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.”

— Louise Erdrich

212. “Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.”

— Louise Erdrich

213. “I put my hand on my chest and closed my eyes. I have a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered. The glass heart belongs to Pollux. There was a ping. To my surprise, it had developed a minute crack, nearly invisible. But it was there, and it hurt.”

— Louise Erdrich

214. “In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself – as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.”

— Louise Erdrich

215. “They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth. Hinsdale.”

— Louise Erdrich

216. “The first snow of the new year lifted my burdensome thoughts. The snow brightened and cleaned and filled the air with oxygen.”

— Louise Erdrich

217. “The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.”

— Louise Erdrich

218. “Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice – for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions.”

— Louise Erdrich

219. “Eddy tells me his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.”

— Louise Erdrich

220. “The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.”

— Louise Erdrich

221. “Even the most traditional Indians, the ones who’d kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school... or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.”

— Louise Erdrich

222. “When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”

— Louise Erdrich

223. “It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.”

— Louise Erdrich

224. “To Delphine, the hesitation of March was cheering. March was all expectation, a gathering of power. Still cold but marginally warmer every day – a hopeful time of the year.”

— Louise Erdrich

225. “I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.”

— Louise Erdrich

226. “Thomas remembered something from his boarding-school days. There, he’d strategized. The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.”

— Louise Erdrich

227. “Juggie Blue: We don’t want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.”

— Louise Erdrich

228. “When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.”

— Louise Erdrich

229. “Everything ceased. She listened hard. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But she could feel the calm breathing of the night. She put on her mother’s mitts, took the ax, stepped out the door. Outside, there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”

— Louise Erdrich

230. “On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.”

— Louise Erdrich

231. “Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children.”

— Louise Erdrich

232. “Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed – the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.”

— Louise Erdrich

233. “Or maybe there was a god. Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent.”

— Louise Erdrich

234. “But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.”

— Louise Erdrich

235. “His father was so very old now that he slept most of the day. He was ninety-four. When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight.”

— Louise Erdrich

236. “I put her ashes in the Mississippi River not because she ever noticed the river or gave the slightest indication she wanted that, but because it was a way to think of her as she’d always been, wordless and inert, pulled along by a strong, hidden current.”

— Louise Erdrich

237. “Wonder what?” “If one of them will ever say, Gee, those damn Indians might have had an idea or two. Shouldn’t have got rid of them all. Maybe we missed out.” Louis laughed. Thomas laughed. They laughed together at the idea.”

— Louise Erdrich

238. “The stars were impersonal. But they took human shapes and arranged themselves in orders that conveyed directions to the next life. There was no time where he was going. He’d always thought that inconceivable. For years now he’d understood that time was all at once, back and forth, upside down. As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.”

— Louise Erdrich

239. “Thomas had tried to educate himself, mainly by reading everything he could find. When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”

— Louise Erdrich

240. “Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?”

— Louise Erdrich

241. “His generation would have to define themselves. Who was an Indian? What? Who, who, who? And how? How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?”

— Louise Erdrich

242. “Watching him closely after he paid for the books and took the package into his hands, I saw his pupils dilate the way a diner’s do when food is brought to the table.”

— Louise Erdrich

243. “The trees were having a last bedtime drink of the great waters that flowed along down there. Like him, before they went to sleep. Beneath that layer of water he sensed beings. They moved so slowly that humans were usually not aware of their existence. But he did feel their movements down in those regions. And yet deeper, far deeper, below those beings, there was the fire of creation, which had been buried at the center of the earth by stars.”

— Louise Erdrich

244. “The tea was made from aromatic cedar fronds and melted snow. It was her favorite kind of tea. There was something about the water that was swirled through the heavens, frozen, scooped up, and boiled with cedar.”

— Louise Erdrich

245. “I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale.”

— Louise Erdrich

246. “Pollux’s grandma had once told him dogs are so close with people that sometimes, when death shows up, the dog will step in and take the hit. Meaning, the dog would go off with death, taking their person’s place. I was pretty sure that Gary had done this for Roland and then visited the store to let me know.”

— Louise Erdrich

247. “The beauty of the sensation was so intense that fear dropped away. It felt like a kind of birth. She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby – skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought.”

— Louise Erdrich

248. “She turned to the window although it was dark now and the glass held only a tired ghost.”

— Louise Erdrich

249. “Sometimes late at night the hospital emitted thin streams of mist from the cracks along its windows and between the bricks. They took the shapes of spirits freed from bodies. The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

— Louise Erdrich

250. “You know any Mormons?” asked Martin Cross. “I don’t think so.” “They haven’t got to you. They’ll come around yet. It’s in their religion to change Indians into whites.” “I thought that was a government job.” “It’s in their holy book. The more we pray, the lighter we get.” “I could stand to drop a few pounds.” “Not that kind of lighter,” Martin laughed. “They think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out. They call it lightsome and gladsome.”

— Louise Erdrich